1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to security in networks.
The scope of the present invention covers, notably, the routing protocol, anonymity and protection of the information, in wired communication networks and wireless networks.
2. Prior Art
In wireless networks, the constraints are high, there is low computation capacity, transmission problems (noise-affected channels) and weak flows. One of the problems is to find an effective solution that could be close to real time (low latency) with protection of the information, that is to say that a hacker cannot understand the information when he manages to intercept it, a guarantee of anonymity, that is to say that a hacker cannot know who is talking with whom, and privacy is maintained without affecting the quality of the traffic, that is to say without adding excessive latency.
The conventional encryption systems with public keys used to encrypt the address of the recipient node and the information itself are generally very slow in relation to the needs of the applications. The prior art discloses a number of solutions that use private key encryption systems. However, these solutions do not offer adequate security, because each node of the network needs to know the private key of the others. Thus, when a node is corrupted, the security of the network collapses.
The document by William Luh, Deepa Kundur, “Distributed Privacy for Visual Sensor Networks via Markov Shares”. In Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Dependability and Security in Sensor Networks and Systems, 2006, discloses a method which divides up the information before transmitting it. This solution protects the information, only if it is assumed that the hacker can intercept a small fraction of the information, and this assumption is improbable in a wireless context. The second drawback is anonymity: the latter is not guaranteed since the authors give no solution for concealing the addresses of the nodes.
The document by V. M. Sidel'nikov. entitled “A public-key cryptosystem based on Reed-Muller codes” Discrete Mathematics and Applications, 4(3):191-207, 1994 also describes a public key encryption system which uses the property of the Muller codes and retains the principle of adding a random error of fixed weight. The performance of such an algorithm is still weak when looking at real time or close to real time applications. This article discloses an algorithm which is more restrictive. The length of the key is always important and the complexity of encryption of a message is greater if the high security is to be maintained. The final point is that this public key encryption system is probabilistic. There is a non-zero probability that the recipient of the message will not succeed in decrypting the message.
The patent application WO 97/48207 discloses a system that can be used to dynamically encrypt a piece of information including date and voice. This encrypted information is not, however, divided up into a plurality of packets.
The publication “Integrated Security and Error Control for Communication Networks using the Mc Eliece Cryptosystem” concerns improving the Goppa code used in the Mc Eliece public key encryption system.
Currently, the systems described in the prior art do not adequately resolve the problems of protection of the transmission in a wireless information transmission network and do not address the problem of the anonymity of the sender and of the receiver.